FORGOTTEN - Bonus: A Conversation with Ilia Calderón

reporting on femicide. Did you find it to be somewhat of a new experience, maybe even a struggle to open yourself up personally, where as journalists were taught not to do that. It was one of the most difficult things to open my heart. Actually had to rewrite many chapters many times. You grew up in a region called Choko, Is that right, correct? Correct? A small town called Ismena. And let's say, as the state is Choko, it's the Pacific coast in the west. Yes, So tell us what

makes this region unique or special? We are more than ninety percent African descendants who were were abandoned by the governments, affected by the corruption of our own leaders. But yeah, we were at the same time happy. When I was growing up, in the first years of my life, we didn't have power. We didn't have electricity, so my clothes and my uniforms to go to school had to be iron with a charcoal iron. I had to walk miles and take a small boat across a river to go

to school. It was hard, but I think it gave me the dry to fight for something, to want to become someone, to do bigger things. And when I was staying I told my mom I wanted to move to Menadine, one of the biggest cities in Columbia, where her sister and family lived. So I moved to live with my Pia and her family and do my high school in Menadine. And that is a city where I first racism for the first time. Can you describe that? Yes, I was

in sixth grade and it hurt me so much. And after I felt so bad because I didn't know what to say, and I decided to forget about the episode. And I didn't say anything about it, not even to my mom. What am I going to say to her? And I decided just to keep it to myself, to keep it to myself. Those microaggressions, the way they look at you, the way they tell you with the body language that you don't belong here, or they want to be away from you, they don't want to be related

to you. Was that just something that you quietly learned how to live with. I just erased them as if it never happens, and then I kept going and growing up. When you go back to those memories, it is hard. I didn't want my daughter to feel like the same way I felt, and we started a long conversation that

never ends and I will never end. Like taking every opportunity you have to talk to your kids about this and those my corogression so called jokes that are offensive went to refer to a dark skinned person are hard and we need to eliminate them from our upbringing. So, from what I understand, before you arrived here in the US, you had this idealized vision of what the US would be like. When did you realize that that vision you

had wasn't necessarily true? In my country, black people were always the service of the house or enslaves or the people working on the plantations, And for me, it was like oh wow. But at the same time, I was reading Tony Morrison and I knew about the experience of the slaves in the United States, but when you come and you see, you know, as you are in the news, you see the news every day, you see the difference

and you can notice institutional racism. Basically, you've experienced backlash against your identity as a woman of Afro Latina descent, and that's essentially three different targets for me. It's like being a minority within a minority, being black, being Hispanic, and being a woman. The racism is very present in Latin America, from Argentina to Mexico whatever. We had people enslave that were brought from Africa against their will. In

those countries, we had history of racism. I am proud to be a black woman with my ethnicity being Hispanic or Latina, but my race is Black, my ethnicity culture is Hispanic. I mean, your husband is Asian, you're after Latina, and you have a daughter who embodies all these backgrounds, and I'm so curious, like what it's like to live

in such a culturally rich household. It's just amazing. We knew we had different upbringings, different cultures, but we decided to embrace our differences and embraced where we are in common. The moral values, the respect, the discipline, the family values were all the same. So we tried to focus and what we have in common, to start racing the family that we have today. I wanted to ask if femicide or gender based violence directed at women is something that

you've confronted in your professional life, actually dedicate. One of the chapters of my book is called the High Price of Silence, and we travel to Mexico and to El Salvador. As hard in our countries is very even in Colombia, not talking about only Mexico, El Salvador, Colombia, Peru. We have so many cases of women that are killed because they are women. As I say, we are not found dead.

Somebody killed a woman, somebody assistin a woman right, and we need to keep bringing the topic to the table. We need to keep raising our voices so more women find a healthy environment where they can raise their voices and where the stories can be heard and believed, and we start to end the situation. One of the underlying issues beneath all of this, it has to do with the corruption that underlays the malfunction of the judicial system

in Latin America is drug trafficking. And that's certainly I mean, that's what ties are two countries together, in Mexico and Colombia. And we spent at least one episode in Forgotten explaining how the US Mexico border became the gateway for Colombian drugs in the eighties and nineties. Yes, we lived in that era in the eighties and the nineties where the war between the car tails and the drug against the cartails was very hard. You felt in danger all the time,

all the time. Every time you were going out of your house. You didn't know if you were coming back a life because a bone board is going to explode at a mall or a public place or just a street, or they were going to kill someoney. And you, you know, we're just passing by. You might as well be describing what at certain periods we don't even have to go to as a far away place to see these kinds of crimes submitted against women. Here in the United States,

we see femicide occurring. We need to have a system that supports women, like federal registration on a system of gender based violence. Our countries need to distribute wars resources to prosecute those crimes. The police forces need to be

well trained when they receive cases of domestic violence. Certainly, some of the things we witness as journalists, even though we don't experience them ourselves personally, they do have an impact, I know, and how to deal with all those experiences and the stories that you cover, the places you visit, and the struggle of the people you interview. Sometimes it's like,

you know, it touches you at a personal level. Sometimes you cry when you go back to a hotel after listening to those kits for example in the caravan, or a teenager that lost his mom that was, you know, murdered by her husband or couple. Is hard, and this book at the same time worked like an outlet of those experiences that taught me and make me grow as a woman and as a professional. Well, thank you so much,

Elia for being our guest on this special episode. To read more about Elia Calderon and her story, check out her book My Time to Speak, Reclaiming Ancestry and Confronting Race. To learn more about femicide in Mexico, listen to our podcast series Forgotten The Women of Juarez. I'm Monica. Thanks for listening,